ged and
therefore taciturn. She herself said afterwards that she "often got
still that way." She so sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after her
long struggle for respectability, that she gave a false name and became
involved in a story to which she could devote but half her attention,
being still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative thought which
continually broke through the flimsy tale she was fabricating.

With the evidence before him, the judge felt obliged to sustain the
policeman's charge, and as Olga could not pay the fine imposed, he
sentenced her to the city prison. The girl, however, had appeared so
strangely that the judge was uncomfortable and gave her in charge of a
representative of the Juvenile Protective Association in the hope that
she could discover the whole situation, meantime suspending the
sentence. It took hours of patient conversation with the girl and the
kindly services of a well-known alienist to break into her dangerous
state of mind and to gain her confidence. Prolonged medical treatment
averted the threatened melancholia and she was at last rescued from the
meaningless despondency so hostile to life itself, which has claimed
many young victims.

It is strange that we are so slow to learn that no one can safely live
without companionship and affection, that the individual who tries the
hazardous experiment of going without at least one of them is prone to
be swamped by a black mood from within. It is as if we had to build
little islands of affection in the vast sea of impersonal forces lest we
be overwhelmed by them. Yet we know that in every large city there are
hundreds of men whose business it is to discover girls thus hard pressed
by loneliness and despair, to urge upon them the old excuse that "no one
cares what you do," to fill them with cheap cynicism concerning the
value of virtue, all to the end that a business profit may be secured.

Had Olga yielded to the solicitations of bad men and had the immigration
authorities in the federal building of Chicago discovered her in the
disreputable hotel in which her captors wanted to place her, she would
have been deported to Sweden, sent home in disgrace from the country
which had failed to protect her. Certainly the immigration laws might do
better than to send a girl back to her parents, diseased and disgraced
because America has failed to safeguard her virtue from the machinations
of well-known but unrestrained criminals. The po